CORE B: Data Management and Computing Many of the data and computing needs of the projects in this P-01 are overlapping. The proposed Data Management and Computing Core will reap economies of scale by pooling resources and by coordinating development. Specifically, the Core has four main objectives. First, to develop and maintain an efficient, cost-effective state-of-the-art computing environment for individual research projects. The computing environment at RAND and elsewhere is changing rapidly, and a continued migration of data preparation/analysis and e-mail communication tasks from Unix-based Sun workstations to Windows NT-based PCs is foreseen during the next five years. The Core will monitor new developments, test promising hardware and software options, and provide guidance to P-01 researchers and programmers in their applications. Second, to collect, update, document, and disseminate a library of contextual data relevant to research on aging. Such data are often prohibitively expensive to collect for individual projects, and provide useful tools to generate results that are directly relevant to public policy. Third, to acquire, manage, and coordinate the use of the HRS and companion surveys, and to extract basic analysis files that are used by multiple projects with cleaned background variables, derived summary measures and merged in external data. These data form the basis of analyses in five projects of this Program Project and are of strategic importance to aging research in the United States. Also, the Core will organize, facilitate, and monitor data protection plans for HRS confidential data. Fourth, to clean, prepare, document, bring into the public domain, and support the IFLS-2 resurvey data collected by Project 2 and the Macedonian Household and Facility Evaluation data collected by Project 5.